Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Today I'm chatting with Sergey Levven who is a co-founder of physical intelligence which is a robotics foundations model company and also professor at UC Berkeley and just generally one of the world's leading researchers in robotics RL and AI. Sergey, thank you for coming on the podcast. >> Thank you and thank you for the kind introduction. >> Let's talk about robotics.

So before I pepper you with questions, I'm wondering if you can give the audience a summary of where physical intelligence is at right now. You guys started a year ago. Yeah. >> And what does the progress look like?

What are you guys working on? >> Yeah. So, physical intelligence aims to build robotic foundation models. And that basically means general purpose models that could in principle control any robot to perform any task.

Uh we care about this because we we see this as a very fundamental uh aspect of the AI problem. Like the robot is essentially uh encompassing all AI technology. If you can get a robot that's truly general, then you can uh do, you know, hopefully a large chunk of what people can do. And where we're at right now is I think we've kind of gotten to the point where we've uh built out a lot of the basics.

And you know, I think those basics actually are pretty cool. Like they work pretty well. We can get a robot that will like fold laundry and that will go into a new home and like try to clean up the kitchen. But in my mind, what we're doing at physical intelligence right now is really the very very early beginning.

It's just like putting in place the basic building blocks on top of which we can then tackle all these like really tough problems. >> And what's a year-by-year vision? So, um, one year in now, I got a chance to watch some of the robots and they can do pretty dextrous tasks like folding a box using grippers and it's like I don't know, it's like pretty hard to fold the box even with like my hands. Um, if you had to go year by year until we get to the full like robotics explosion, what is happening every single year?

What is the thing that needs to be unlocked etc. So there are a few things that we ...